Sunday, 21 July 2013

Sabrina is a fairytale love story set around themes of rivalry and
class. Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn) is a chauffer’s daughter, living on a
large Long Island Estate. For some time she’s been in love with the rich and
careless David Larrabee (William Holden) who barely notices her. After two
years studying in Paris,
the grownup Sabrina returns a beautiful and sophisticated woman and David falls
in love. The couple’s relationship threatens to derail a big merger for the
family company so David’s brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) decides to woo the
girl himself before packing her back off to Paris.

This film is one of several in my
girlfriend’s DVD collection that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while.
Hepburn is her favourite actress but it was Sabrina
I chose over other films because of the male stars. I’ll happily watch anything
Bogart and Holden are in but have to say that I was a little disappointed with
this film. The stars failed to gel on screen and a little reading tells me that
Bogart was unhappy for the duration of the shoot with both director Billy
Wilder and his co-star Hepburn who he believed needed too many takes to get her
dialogue right. There was better chemistry between Holden and Hepburn which
isn’t surprising as the two began a brief affair while shooting the movie.

Sunday, 7 October 2012

The winner of eight Academy Awards including the coveted Best Picture, My Fair Lady is based on the
stage musical of the same name and tells the story of a young working class
flower seller called Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) who is taken in by an
arrogant phonetics Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) who bets that he can transform
the young woman’s gutter mouth and slovenly demeanour into that of a lady who
could pass for Aristocracy under close inspection in just six months. The film
can rightly be called a classic and contains some of the most recognisable
songs in all of musical cinema.

The film is lavishly designed and very well made, featuring
some incredible sets which have such a realistic look that I wasn’t totally
convinced they weren’t real, despite being more than familiar with some of the
locations. The entire film was shot in California
but creates a vision of London
as real as I’ve seen in any American film. And not a single shot of Big Ben or
a ‘London, England’ caption. Bliss. It is also
a very well acted film on the whole with just one exception. Rex Harrison won a
more than deserved Oscar for his performance and Stanley Holloway and Gladys
Cooper were also recognised with deserved nominations but the actor who lets
the film down is its lead, Audrey Hepburn.